Not since Franz Kafka's
America
has a European artist turned himself with such intensity to the meaning
of American culture and mythology. Sergio Leone's career is
remarkable in its unrelenting attention to both America and American genre
film. In France, Truffaut, Godard, and Chabrol have used American film as
a touchstone for their own vision, but Leone, an Italian, a Roman who
began to learn English only after five films about the United States,
devoted most of his creative life to this examination.

Leone's films are not realistic or naturalistic visions of the
American nightmare or fairy tale, but comic nightmares about existence.
The feeling of unreality is central to Leone's work. His is a world
of magic and horror. Religion is meaningless, a sham which hides honest
emotions; civilization is an extension of man's need to dominate
and survive by exploiting others. The Leone world, while not womanless, is
set up as one in which men face the horror of existence. In this, Leone is
very like Howard Hawks: as in Hawks's films, death erases a man. A
man who dies is a loser, and the measure of a man is his ability to
survive, to laugh or sneer at death. This is not a bitter point in Leone
films. There are few lingering deaths and very little blood. Even the
death of Ramon (Gian Maria Volonte) in
Fistful of Dollars
takes place rather quickly and with far less blood than the comparable
death in
Yojimbo.
A man's death is less important than how he faces it. The only
thing worth preserving in Leone's world is the family—and
his world of American violence is such a terrible place that few families
survive. In
Fistful of Dollars
, Clint Eastwood's primary emotional reaction is to attempt to
destroy the family of the woman Ramon has taken. In the later films,
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
and
Once upon a Time in the West, Duck, You Sucker
and
Once upon a Time in America
, family life is minimal and destroyed by self-serving evil, not out of
hatred but by a cold, passionless commitment to self-interest.
Leone's visual obsessions contribute to his thematic interests.
Many directors could work with and develop the
same themes and characters, but Leone's forte lies in the
development of these themes and characters in a personal world. No
director, with the possible exception of Sam Fuller, makes as extensive us
of the close-up as does Leone, and Leone's close-ups often show
only a portion of the face, usually the eyes of one of the main
characters. It is the eyes of these men that reveal what they are
feeling—if they are feeling anything.

Such characters almost never define their actions in words. Plot is of
minimal interest to Leone. What is important is examination of the
characters, watching how they react, what makes them tick. It appears
almost as if everything is, indeed, happening randomly, as if we are
watching with curiosity the responses of different types of people, trying
to read meaning in the slightest flick of an eyelid. The visual impact of
water dripping on Woody Strode's hat, or Jack Elam's annoyed
reaction to a fly, is of greater interest to Leone than the gunfight in
which the two appear in
Once upon a Time in the West.
The use of the pan in Leone films is also remarkable. The pan from the
firing squad past the church and to the poster of the governor, behind
which Rod Steiger watches in bewilderment through the eyes of the
governor's image, is a prime example in
Duck, You Sucker.
The shot ties the execution to the indifferent church, to the non-seeing
poster, and to Steiger's reaction in one movement.

The apparent joy and even comedy of destruction and battle in Leone films
is often followed immediately by some intimate horror, some personal touch
that underlines the real meaning of the horror which moments before had
been amusing. The death of Dominick and his final words, "I
slipped," in
Once upon a Time in America
undercut the comedy and zest for battle. There is little dialogue; the
vision of the youthful dead dominates as it does in the cave scene in
Duck, You Sucker
, in which Juan's family lies massacred.

At the same time, Leone's fascination with spontaneous living, his
zeal for existence in the midst of his morality films, can be seen in his
handling of details. For example, food in his films is always colorful and
appetizing and people eat it ravenously.

The obsession of Leone protagonists and villains, major and minor, with
the attainment of wealth can be seen as growing out of a dominant strain
within American genres, particularly western and gangster films. The
desire for wealth and power turns men into ruthless creatures who violate
land and family.

Leone's films are explorations of the mythic America he created.
Unlike many directors, he did not simply repeat the same convention in a
variety of ways. Each successive film takes the same characters and
explores them in greater depth, and Leone's involvement with this
exploration is intense.

—Stuart M. Kaminsky

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